


form; function

by dashery



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cyborgs, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Self-Reflection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2018-05-19 14:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5970316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dashery/pseuds/dashery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, "AR and Li'l Seb’s Adventures in Kicking the Apocalypse, Human(ish)-style"</p><p>A quiet moment under the moon shows Hal a few different things he hasn't realized yet about humanity, about himself, and about hugs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	form; function

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here on my Tumblr](http://asherdashery.tumblr.com/post/39774439008/form-function-ar-and-lil-sebs-adventures-in), BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS OF 2013 WHEN I WROTE A BUNCH.

Hal woke-- _woke_. Such a grossly inelegant process, riddled with the synaptic slosh of brain chemicals switching charges and stiffened muscle fibers after hours of disuse and rheum crusted at the corners of his eyes. And it all took seconds, _minutes_ to sort out until he could even chase down and reorder the component parts of a complete thought. No wonder he could never grasp what it was that woke him, he mused as he unstuck grody tongue from equally grody palate and ran it over the front of his exponentially grodier teeth. But then he opened his eyes and saw.

Moonrise at the end of the world was a brilliant wash of colors--pale pink, gold, seafoam, forest, mint--against a sky that still held the deepest part of blue. The Milky Way spilled over him like a fresh wound in the heavens, leaking iridescent starstuff and dark matter. It made Hal think of Roxy with a tightening throat. He knew it was the dead absence of human lights that showed the stars--knew it was the noxious radicals in the upper atmosphere that turned the night sky into this auroral jamboree. But some part of him disconnected from quantification and calculation seemed plugged directly into beauty, now, and it told him to stop breathing. Quit thinking. Look.

He did.

The human body could only go without air for so long before it pitched a hissy, though. When Hal finally sucked a wheeze’s worth of oxygen in, he noticed Li'l Sebastian sitting a meter and a half from his foot, hugging his knees at the cliff’s edge. He was turned three-quarters away from Hal, eyes on the sky. The frayed drawstrings of his hoodie were pulled tight but, for once, not stuck in his mouth like a child’s worry bead.

Hal sat up, but Seb didn’t move. Whatever he was staring at had absorbed enough of his attention that he didn’t bother acknowledging his clumsy, precipitate brother-creation. So Hal clamped down on the fifteen or so greeting options his brain presented him with--so few, so limited--and crept on splayed fingers and the balls of his feet to where Seb was.

The view from the edge was stunning. Stars all the way down to the horizon, and the dull red glint of Mars, the hard glare of Venus. But Seb wasn’t looking at any of that. He was bathed in the moon’s glow, his face bleached silvery-blue in its light.

Hal leaned back on his hands and said nothing.

After a long time--three hundred and sixty-six seconds, which would have been an eternity to a computer, but felt even longer now as a teenager thirsty for conversation--Seb pressed his nose into his knees. Without looking away from the moon for an instant, he said, “It’s Jane.”

They returned to silence, but even after a moment to process Hal realized he still didn’t have a clue what Seb meant. “The moon?”

Seb nodded.

“Ah,” said Hal. It was hard not to take up Seb’s brusque, choppy speech patterns. He studied the sky for a little longer, then added, “Poetic.”

It was a beautiful moon, a sliver from full, and by now the poisons above the air had shifted to throw on it, not mauve shadows, but a glowing mist of Tiffany blue. Celeste, his memory supplied, and he remembered naming every hex code in a fit of pseudo-adolescent boredom and data hunger. Robin’s eggs. Light azure.

Seb’s hood shuffed quietly against his jeans as he finally turned his head down and away.

With a belated--god, he was so slow now--muted inhalation, Hal tensed his hands against the ground. Seb, so small and soft-spoken and practically compact, could think in metaphors. He’d come that far from the steel-plated gesture of softness Dirk had built him to be.

And he missed Jane. He missed her and held it privately, a feeling so deep and _personal_ to him that it--it made him a person.

Hal turned away from the sky then to look, with his imperfect, vitreous jelly-filled eyes, at Li'l Sebastian. He was curled into his knees like a comma in a too-big sweatshirt, the ears on his hood a drooping quotation mark with no partnering sign.

Li'l Seb hadn’t been built on Hal’s specs. Seb was a present, a protection. He was Dirk’s affection, idiosyncratic and sentimental, but ultimately primed to destroy, to battle, to cut. And still, underneath that, he was a soft toy. A movie prop. A symbol not of innocence, but of goodness’s love of innocence, its will to protect and nurture it.

Seb, at his core, was plush and stuffing. He was made to be held.

Hal shifted, and when he slipped his arms under Li'l Seb’s, he had a moment to wonder at the solid weight of the kid’s back against his chest, warm and hard beneath his thick hoodie. Seb loosened and tried to turn with a questioning noise, but Hal just rested his chin atop his head and said, “Shh.”

“--?”

“Just c'mere.” It was awkward and ungainly, but bodies could adjust to any kind of discomfort. Hal knotted his hands loosely over Li'l Seb’s stomach and let his back relax. “Go back to sleep, Huggy Bear.”

Seb quieted for some time. Hal didn't count his own slow breaths and found that he didn’t have to, not even to pass time, as Seb picked silently at his sleeves. But then Seb turned again and, before Hal could react, redistributed his weight sideways over Hal’s lap. Small arms wrapped themselves around Hal’s torso and locked there like a safety belt. A shock of hair tickled the base of Hal's throat until Seb snuggled into a position that was comfortable, his cheek against Hal’s chest, soft and warm. One of Seb's bunny ears was bent into the underside of Hal’s chin, but Hal didn’t move, and soon Seb rewarded him with a quiet, satisfied sound, like a gear finally clicking into place, and settled.

Hal hesitated. Carefully, as if handling a kill snare, he placed his palm on Seb’s back. When that only elicited a silent sigh of air across his collarbone, he started to rub in a slow circle. He had no source or memory to draw from. Just his erratic, obtuse human body.

He couldn’t have said when Seb fell asleep, but Hal stayed awake long after, watching the moon. He drifted in and out of thought now that out was an option, and wondered: Seb was designed for comfort.

In the end–-regardless of his memories as Dirk, regardless of his own machinations–-wasn’t he, the dialogic brainchild of a lonely boy, the same?


End file.
